Wizard needs amperage badly

[zdashamber]

Aw, hell. So, thanks to tlatoani I've started looking into amperage. Turns out it's easy to figure out the amperage of anything: America's voltage is a relatively constant 120, so you take the number of watts and divide it by 120, and voila, amps. For instance, my erring space heater, which sucks down 1500 watts, is taking up 12.5 amps on my circuit.

Trouble is? Every single space heater sold Also sucks down 12.5 amps. Or at least, all 8-12 I saw today while out searching.

And my circuit? Is 15 amps.

So just now I was figuring how many amps I use in day-to-day living. I don't want to screw around getting at the back of my computer to check it and the monitor, so I'm going with a 400 watt estimate I found on the web. Everything else, I lifted and shone light on and squinted at and so forth.

These are the things I have on/plugged in most of the time:

400 watts: computer and CRT monitor
10 watts: computer speakers
120 watts: light fixture, 3 bulb chandelier, each bulb looks like 40 watts
20 watts: phone charger (it says 160 milli-amps; I'm rounding up) (I bet it's usually at the 1-5 watts that I've heard transformers generally run, and the 20 watts is when it's actually charging the phone)
4 watts: clock
6 watts: salt lamp
8 watts: snake heater

Which comes out to 568 watts, or roughly 4.8 amps, for stuff that I use routinely.

So right there a space heater shouldn't work ever on my 15 amp circuit. I wondered, though, what if I were to go hog-wild and plug in/turn on everything electrical in my room? We'd add:

75 watts: the pink floor lamp
60 watts: the blue desk lamp
25 watts: the purple glitter lamp
22 watts: the boombox

For a grand total of 750 watts, or 6.25 amps.

Now, I've looked around a bit on the web and found underdesk heaters and electric blankets I could get for around 2-3 amps total, putting me at roughly 9 amps total.

But here's the devilish bit: this circuit isn't just me. Oh, no. No, when this circuit blows, it takes with it all the lights and outlets in Dread Girl's room, all the lights and outlets in the empty bedroom upstairs, all the lights and outlets in the living room downstairs, and one of the two outlets in Zoned Girl's room.

Fucked up. When the new girl finally moves in, will we even be able to run normal lights and computers?

Someday, I'll live in a house where I can tear out the walls, put in insulation, put in proper double-paned glass so you can't feel the breezes unless you've actually opened the windows, give each room at least 3 outlets and put each room on its own circuit...

Yeah, that'll be the day.

Comments

[tlatoani.livejournal.com]

Your electrical situation is bad, with that circuit covering all those rooms, but it isn't necessarily as bad as you think. Those values are for peak power draw, which is often different from what a given device draws when in normal use. Turning them all on at once would be very bad, but they may be able to co-exist better in routine use. (The space heater is still pretty intense, and I suspect it draws close to peak power whenever it cycles the heating elements on depending on how high you have it set.)

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

Owch... you're reminding me of the plot point in Apollo 13 where the team on the command module simulator's trying to figure out how what sequence to bring the systems up without blowing the breaker.